Leaded Strand Lamp:Selected for Inclusion for an Exhibition of the best of irish Design as part of the Vernacular Exhibition in London Design Festival 2013. Curated by Ann Mulrooney

Contemporary product made using traditional Northern irish metal craft skills

Optimal Front Page Advertising

We consider a model of an on-line software market, where an intermediary distributes products from sellers to buyers. When products of sellers are vertically differentiated, an intermediary, earning a proportion of sales, has an incentive to hide the worse product on the second page, and only keep the better product on the front page: that weakens the competition, allowing the seller with the better product to charge a higher price. With heterogeneous visiting costs to the second page, the platform's revenue might improve, but the outcome will become socially suboptimal.

Power-Capped DVFS and Thread Allocation with ANN Models on Modern NUMA Systems

Abstract—Power capping is an essential function for efficient power budgeting and cost management on modern server systems. Contemporary server processors operate under power caps by using dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). However, these processors are often deployed in non-uniform memory
access (NUMA) architectures, where thread allocation between cores may significantly affect performance and power consumption. This paper proposes a method which maximizes performance under power caps on NUMA systems by dynamically optimizing two knobs: DVFS and thread allocation. The method selects the optimal combination of the two knobs with models based on artificial neural network (ANN) that captures the nonlinear effect of thread allocation on performance. We implement
the proposed method as a runtime system and evaluate it with twelve multithreaded benchmarks on a real AMD Opteron based NUMA system. The evaluation results show that our method outperforms a naive technique optimizing only DVFS by up to
67.1%, under a power cap.

Evaluation of information extraction techniques to label extracted data from e-commerce web page

Automatically determining and assigning shared and meaningful text labels to data extracted from an e-Commerce web page is a challenging problem. An e-Commerce web page can display a list of data records, each of which can contain a combination of data items (e.g. product name and price) and explicit labels, which describe some of these data items. Recent advances in extraction techniques have made it much easier to precisely extract individual data items and labels from a web page, however, there are two open problems: 1. assigning an explicit label to a data item, and 2. determining labels for the remaining data items. Furthermore, improvements in the availability and coverage of vocabularies, especially in the context of e-Commerce web sites, means that we now have access to a bank of relevant, meaningful and shared labels which can be assigned to extracted data items. However, there is a need for a technique which will take as input a set of extracted data items and assign automatically to them the most relevant and meaningful labels from a shared vocabulary. We observe that the Information Extraction (IE) community has developed a great number of techniques which solve problems similar to our own. In this work-in-progress paper we propose our intention to theoretically and experimentally evaluate different IE techniques to ascertain which is most suitable to solve this problem.

Secagem convectiva de produtos alimentares: otimização e controlo

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar a cinética de secagem do bacalhau salgado verde (Gadus morhua) em secador convectivo. É apresentada a análise da composição físico-química dos bacalhaus utilizados nos ensaios experimentais, bem como o estudo das isotermas de sorção do produto, através de experiências e modelação matemática. Dos modelos usados para o ajuste das isotermas de sorção do bacalhau salgado verde, o que melhor se adaptou aos resultados experimentais foi o modelo de GAB Modificado, com coeficientes de correlação variando entre 0,992 e 0,998. Para o controlo do processo de secagem (nomeadamente os parâmetros temperatura, humidade relativa e velocidade do ar) foi utilizada lógica difusa, através do desenvolvimento de controladores difusos para o humidificador, desumidificador, resistências de aquecimento e ventilador. A modelação do processo de secagem foi realizada através de redes neuronais artificiais (RNA), modelo semi-empírico de Page e modelo difusivo de Fick. A comparação entre dados experimentais e simulados, para cada modelo, apresentou os seguintes erros: entre 1,43 e 11,58 para o modelo de Page, 0,34 e 4,59 para o modelo de Fick e entre 1,13 e 6,99 para a RNA, com médias de 4,38, 1,67 e 2,93 respectivamente. O modelo obtido pelas redes neuronais artificiais foi submetido a um algoritmo de otimização, a fim de buscar os parâmetros ideais de secagem, de forma a minimizar o tempo do processo e maximizar a perda de água do bacalhau. Os parâmetros ótimos obtidos para o processo de secagem, após otimização realizada, para obter-se uma humidade adimensional final de 0,65 foram: tempo de 68,6h, temperatura de 21,45°C, humidade relativa de 51,6% e velocidade de 1,5m/s. Foram também determinados os custos de secagem para as diferentes condições operacionais na instalação experimental. Os consumos por hora de secagem variaram entre 1,15 kWh e 2,87kWh, com uma média de 1,94kWh.

Ecologia alimentar, idade e crescimento, relações morfométricas e aspetos reprodutivos de Sardinella aurita (Valenciennes, 1847) e Sardinella maderensis Lowe (1838) na Costa Sul de Angola (Namibe)

Dissertação de Mestrado, Biologia Marinha, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2015